On philosophy’s (lack of) progress: From Plato to Wittgenstein (and Rawls)
“Uberhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, dass er viel grosser ausschaut, als er wirklich ist.” Nestroy; used by
Wittgenstein as the motto for his later master-work,
‘Philosophical Investigations’.
There is a wonderful remark in Wittgenstein’s ‘Culture and Value’, which runs as follows:
“I read “philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of ‘Reality’ than Plato got...” What a singular
situation. How singular then that Plato has been able to get even as far as he did! Or that we
could get no further afterwards! Was it because Plato was so clever?” i
Wittgenstein thought that it was a kind of ghastly and mythologically-grand error to think of
philosophy as a subject that progresses; at any rate, if ‘progress’ is to mean anything resembling
its meaning in the case which tends to be our paradigm-case for the meaning of progress, namely
(normal) science.
The above remark of his parallels another -- earlier -- remark, this time from the ‘Tractatus’:
“The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of
nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God
and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of
the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the
modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.” ii
These (in my view) very deep sentences from Wittgenstein's early masterpiece deeply provoke
readers: they seem to suggest that there has actually been the very opposite of progress, in
(roughly) the philosophy of science and the metaphysical ‘foundations’ of ‘the modern system’.
That, far from moving on from the days of Plato et al, we have in an important respect moved
backward, precisely because we have combined a lack of moving on with an illusion of having
moved on. We are thus less clear than we used to be that (as Wittgenstein puts it at the very
opening of (in section 1 of) Philosophical Investigations), “Explanations come to an end
somewhere”.iii
Plato’s dialogues themselves are somewhat equivocal, when assessed according to these
‘Wittgensteinian’ criteria: the ‘later’, less ‘Socratic’ and more didactic dialogues in some cases
certainly seem to want to explain ‘everything’ in their field of view; the ‘early’ dialogues tend to
be more content to leave their field in a state of aporia, reflecting Socrates’s celebrated claim to
know only that he did not know, and his unmasking of others’ pompous claims to know.iv Even
these (early) dialogues might not be wholly to Wittgenstein’s liking, though: did Socrates
sometimes make his co-conversationalists feel a need for or the lack of a foundation for their
beliefs or practice that was in fact not genuinely missing (because it had never really been
needed) in the first place?
This, in my view, is indeed a pertinent question. By my lights, there has certainly then been
progress of a kind in the move from Plato’s Socrates at his best to Wittgenstein, in philosophy.
But what about since then? If we look at the most significant figures to have succeeded
Wittgenstein, in philosophy, do they hold true to his insights about the character of philosophy,
and about how not to fall into the illusions of scientism? That is the question of this paper: Has
philosophy after Wittgenstein succeeded in manifesting a ‘metaphilosophy’ which successfully
follows Wittgenstein in not overstating or mischaracterising the actual extent or nature of
progress in philosophy?
But this is a very large question; I shall restrict myself, in the compass of the present paper, to
considering just one particularly significant aspect of the philosophy of one such philosopher, a
philosopher sometimes alleged indeed to be an inheritor of a Wittgensteinian mantle: John
Rawls.v
Why Rawls in particular? Primarily because he is the widely-acknowledged father of
contemporary liberal political philosophy, the dominant political philosophy of our times
(dominant in the academy and, as discussed below, fairly dominant in actually-existing worldpolitics, too). He can therefore justly be taken as an exemplar of liberal political theory in
general. What I argue here through engaging with the texts of John Rawls is, I submit, true in
large measure of broadly social-contractarian-influenced liberalism. For instance, of Dworkin,
Scanlon - and even of Locke. (Or at least: to the extent, whatever that extent is, that what I argue
here is true of the likes of them, too, then this paper is of indefinitely wide interest.)
Furthermore, I believe that Rawls’s highly-influential philosophy at what should be its heart is
in fact deformed by scientistic ambition, an ambition that dangerously (and more or less
deliberately?) masks its real intention (namely, the rhetorical promulgation of and an obscuring
apologia for a specific vision of society (or, in a sense, of its absence), and, concomitantly, of the
self. I address this vision towards the close of the present paper.). Thus there is particular interest
in putting Rawls’s bold theoretical liberal vision beside the import of the remarks above of
Wittgenstein’s.
Mine is then a challenge, by way of a ‘metaphilosophical’ reflection informed by historical,
philosophical and political considerations, to Moral (Philosophical) Theory, and to the ‘dominant
[liberal] paradigm’ in political philosophy. To Rawlsian philosophy as theory -- as an extravagant
version, indeed, of the project of theory: ‘grand’ theory in political philosophy. (Rawls is
particularly important of course because his theory is taken to be the basis for (or apologia for)
how roughly the basic institutions of ‘liberal democratic’ societies such as ours are or are to be
justified. This matter therefore has an importance that cuts some considerable way beyond merely
intellectual or scholarly dispute. It is often said that our very political leaders today (at least, the
‘liberals’ among them) are Rawlsians.vi)
One might contrast here most of the comparatively unambitious (though in my view still
over-ambitious) field of ‘Cognitive Science’; Most Cognitive Scientists spend much of their time
in effect running around after real scientists (brain scientists, physicists, etc.).vii Whereas the
scale of Rawls’s ambition is evident from the very first sentences of the first section of A Theory
of Justice: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A
theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws
and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they
are unjust.” This supposedly direct and precise analogy makes clear that Rawls’s modelling of his
project on science -- polemically, his scientism -- is indeed ‘grand’ and bold. Indeed, I would
characterize it as at least as dangerous as it is fertile. The placing of justice above all other
virtues, for society, turns out to be an enterprise that may result in the fragmentation of society
itself.
Of course, I cannot hope to justify that last claim here.viii What I aim to do in the present
paper is to focus principally on just one -- crucial -- issue in Rawlsian liberalism: a difficulty in
understanding what the force of the famous neo-contractarianism -- the ‘original position’ -- in
Rawls is supposed to be. I shall, in the course of my discussion, consider an analogy to Plato’s
‘early, Socratic’ “Euthyphro” dialogue, an analogy perhaps suggested already by my quote from
the ‘Tractatus’, above. This analogy will explicate more fully the sense in which we can justly
find Rawls to be possessed of (or by) a grand (implicitly scientistic) vision.
John Rawls, in his early work, in ‘A Theory of Justice’, looks to ‘the original position’ as
something like an ‘Archimedean point’; a point from which, ideally, everything in the target area
can or could be explained. He seeks to find a point or ‘place’ from which principles of justice can
be determined, and justified. This ‘place’ should be neither merely some place in the world -which would fail to provide the independence sought for in an Archimedean point -- nor
somewhere wholly removed from it -- as it had been, to the point of metaphysical dubiety, in
Kant (and Plato).
It is worth quoting at length from a key statement of this aspiration -- beginning with a
telling analogy of Rawls’s own -- from p.47 of Rawls’s text:
“A useful comparison here is with the problem of describing the sense of grammaticalness that
we have for the sentences of our native language. [Here, there is a footnote to the grand ‘scientific’
ambition of the father of Cognitive Science, Noam Chomsky.] In this case the aim is to characterize the
ability to recognize well-formed sentences by formulating clearly expressed principles which
make the same discriminations as the native speaker. This is a difficult undertaking which,
although still unfinished, is known to require theoretical constructions that far outrun the ad hoc
precepts of our explicit grammatical knowledge. A similiar situation presumably holds in moral
philosophy. There is no reason to assume that our sense of justice can be adequately
characterized by familiar common sense precepts, or derived from the more obvious learning
principles. A correct account of moral capacities will certainly involve principles and theoretical
constructions which may eventually require fairly sophisticated mathematics as well. This is to
be expected, since on the contract view the theory of justice is part of the theory of rational
choice. Thus the idea of the original position and of an agreement on principles there does not
seem too complicated or unnecessary.” ix
Thus, if such a ‘point’ or ‘place’ can be found as Rawls seeks, an ‘original position’ (even if just
in our minds or in a representational/symbolic system), if there’s a there ‘there’, then it will
enable us to determine rationally what is just.x
Here is how Michael Sandel sketches the aspiration -- and a central difficulty that arises with
it:
“[Rawls needs] to find a middle way between between conventionalism and arbitrariness, to seek
a standard of appraisal neither compromised by its implication in the world nor dissociated and
so disqualified by detachment. // With contract theory, the challenge posed by the Archimedean
point takes...determinate form. Clearly, justification involves some sort of interplay between
contracts and principles. Actual contracts presuppose principles of justice, which derive in turn
from a hypothetical original contract. But how does justification work there? Is recourse to yet a
further layer of antecedent principles required? Or is contract at that stage morally self-sufficient,
and fully self-justifying? At times the search for the ultimate sanction appears an infinitely
elusive dance of procedure and principle, each receding in turn behind the other. For given the
assumptions of contract theory, neither seems to offer a stable resting point on which to found the
other. If the parties to the original contract choose the principles of justice, what is to say that
they have chosen rightly? And if they choose in the light of principles antecedently given, in what
sense can it be said that they have chosen at all? The question of justification thus becomes a
question of priority; which comes first -- really, ultimately first -- the contract or the principle?” xi
This seems to me an excellent question. I shall suggest below that closely-reading Rawls’s
‘Theory of Justice’ (and closely-reading his subsequent corpus) takes one if anything further
from an answer to it than one already probably is.
However, we should address first the worry that Sandel has perhaps read Rawls
uncharitably, before we seek to draw morals from or gain inspiration from his question(s). For it
might be submitted that Sandel reads Rawls too literalistically, here (as if he, Rawls, were
someone like David Gauthier on one interpretation of his (Gauthier’s) work, someone who does
take there to be something awfully like a real contract, real bargaining, in his account of
‘justice’). For isn’t the contract idea really only an attempt to model our sense of justice, as part
of a project of (following Chomsky) modelling the universal human ‘moral capacity’?
Well, but if the quotation from Rawls that I gave above is to be believed, his is not merely
a model in the sense of a (Wittgensteinian) ‘object of comparison’ (see PI section 131). If Rawls
is indeed (as he says) following Chomsky,xii then the legitimate question(s) that Sandel is aiming
to raise can at least be reformulated roughly thus: Isn’t there a sense in which we should indeed
(if we are to follow Rawls) think of this ‘contract’ as (aiming to be) determinative and
justificatory; but then, what is the status of Rawls’s contract idea, and what justificatory
authority does it (and what goes on ‘in’ it) have? If it were something very like a real contract
that occurs in Rawls’s ‘place’, as perhaps it is in Gauthier’s, then we would understand how to
assess it. Given that it isn’t, then what is it?
It might be objected against me that I am wilfully ignoring the way that Rawls’s
‘modelling’ is understood as being validated, by him, the way in which what goes on in Rawls’s
‘place’ attains real, human meaning. The way in question is thought to be the method of
reflective equilibrium. But once more this simply raises Sandel’s question: Where/how does this
yield (any) justification? Where in what Sandel calls the “elusive dance of procedure and
principle” xiii do we find anything in the slightest Archimedean? Is Rawls’s anything other than a
cleverly-disguised (but ultimately merely circular) bootstrapping operation?
So, I think we are justified in starting to follow through on Sandel’s dilemma:
“If the parties to the original contract choose the principles of justice, what is to say that they
have chosen rightly?
And if they choose in the light of principles antecedently given, in what sense can it be said
that they have chosen at all?”
I want to remark now an extremely striking parallel between these fundamental questions
Sandel raises for Rawls, and the questions Socrates raised, near the very beginning of Western
philosophy, for Euthyphro. The latter questions may be put thus:
If the Gods choose what is right and wrong (etc.), then what is to say that they have chosen
rightly?
And if they choose in the light of principles antecedently given, in what sense can it be
said that they have chosen at all?
The dilemma for Rawls is the very same one that faced Euthyphro. I suspect that we have on
balance seen here the very opposite of progress in philosophy since Socrates’s/Euthyphro’s time;
because at least Euthyphro did not in the end claim to be able to solve the paradox (and still less
did Socrates). Pretending to have solved a paradox when one has not done so is worse than doing
nothing at all.
Now, thinking back to our quotation from the ‘Tractatus’, above: Wittgenstein, presumably,
would remark that the best option to take might be simply to say that what the Gods chose was as
a result right: for this would at least make the terminus clear. While Rawls (who is it seems in
the position designated by Wittgenstein in TLP 6.372 as that of the scientistic thinker -- and, as
we saw above the opening of and certain key moments in his ‘Theory of Justice’ making clear,
more or less willingly so) somehow gives the impression that, in the field of political philosophy,
everything fundamental has been explained by his intervention.
But let us explore the options a little more, before settling on that judgement on Rawls.
Could Rawls not follow Wittgenstein; couldn’t he say that what his ‘gods’ (people) choose/chose
is/was as a result right?
As we discussed above, choosing in the original position is meant to be a ‘model’ of
moral judgement; but this surely would make the model too strong. Rawls wants something to be
discovered, un-covered -- not just ‘invented’.
Could Rawls say that there isn’t really any choice in the original position; that ‘rational
choice’ or whatever happens when we correctly go about ‘modelling’ our moral and political
thinking is really just the un-covering of the dictates of reason?xiv
This would fit with the science-analogy that I have suggested implicitly structures so
much of Rawls’s thought. Rational choice theory, as science, yields discovered truths, and so,
presumably (to use the terminology that Rawls comes to prefer to that of ‘rational choice’) does
right reasoning about the Reasonable. The original position would then, I suppose, be a mere
device which enabled the exercise – more, the discovery -- of true reason. But this very much
seems to remove the sense, repeatedly emphasised by Rawls, that individuals actually engage in
an active process of figuring out, deciding, even agreeing the principles of justice. Rawls doesn’t
want his ‘g/Gods’ to be mere computation-devices, devoid of any powers of choice or
deliberation. (This would, among other things, make them too remote from us; and us is who
‘they’ – the would-be entrants to the ‘original position’ – are supposed to be.)
(Early) Rawls believes that there has been progress in philosophy since Locke’s and Rousseau’s
and Kant’s time (and presumably still more so since Plato’s) in significant part because he, along
with others, has successfully found a role for the theory of rational choice in moral and political
philosophy. He remarks on p.16 of ‘A theory of justice’ that “The merit of the contract
terminology is that it conveys that principles of justice may be conceived as principles that would
be chosen by rational persons, and that in this way conceptions of justice may be explained and
justified.” If we were to ‘translate’ this into the language of the “Euthyphro” dialogue, it would
read roughly as follows: ‘The merit of speaking of ‘the Gods’ and what they would choose is that
it conveys that principles of morality (piety, etc.) may be conceived as principles that would be
chosen by Gods, and that in this way conceptions of morality (piety) may be explained and
justified.’ But put in that way, this sounds distinctly underwhelming. The lack of clarity Rawls is
bringing to the situation is now, I think, clarified.
The denizens of the original position surely are as good as (being) g/Gods. They are
utterly abstracted from circumstance;xv while they are omniscient concerning the range of
circumstances they might eventually find themselves in; they make no errors of reasoning; and so
forth.xvi But what my ‘translation’ of Rawls’s explication of the original position contract
terminology back into ‘Socratic’ terms makes clear that this helps Rawls not one jot.
Socrates, in his discussion with Euthyphro, allowed that what the Gods agreed on would be right.
But he raised a worry about whether it would be right because they agreed on it, or agreed on
because it was right. Has Rawls advanced our understanding at all about which of these, if either,
we should say? Rawls wishes, through ‘the original position’, to express “the idea that moral
principles are the object of rational choice.” (Theory, p.251) Very well; but does that take us any
further, either? Couldn’t Euthyphro happily have said as much, on the Gods’ behalf?
It might of course be replied once more that Rawls’s concept of ‘reflective equilibrium’ xvii
finesses this problem. Could Rawls say that it is neither exactly that his gods choose what is just,
nor exactly that what is just is prior to their discovery of it, but some subtle composite or
superposition of the two, worked out over time, by each and every one of us? But I would
counter that all that ‘reflective equilibrium’ does is find a way of marrying what ‘the original
position’ comes up with with our “considered judgements” xviii about justice etc., or (alternatively
put) of compromising between the two. It does not itself give any weight to the original position
itself. (If I don’t really understand ‘the original position’, if it isn’t in the end coherent or
possessed of a coherent aspiration or place in one’s thinking, then ‘reflective equilibrium’ can’t
help me!) And so our problem remains: Does the original position (when suitably reflected on
and in) have any justifying force? When we reflect as fully as possible, and imaginatively enter
this ‘place’, what helps us to make any real progress with our moral / political-philosophical
thinking, there? Are Rawls’s principles of justice right because the denizens of the original
position would choose them; or would they choose those principles simply because the principles
are right? What is the status of Rawlsian ‘contract theory’?
It seems to me that when Wittgenstein’s ‘Ancients’, such as Euthyphro at a certain point in his
discussion with Socrates, say that it is what God chooses that is as a result right, this at least has
the virtue of clarity. (Incidentally, it makes no difference here whether one says ‘God’ or ‘the
g/Gods’ -- just as in the original position, where Rawls eventually makes clear that there
wouldn’t really be any discussion,xix as all the ‘beings’ there are identical, and so one could just
take any one of them, and the rational choice made would be the same as if one took a thousand
of ‘them’) It is clear that there is no real justification or explanation in Euthyphro; and that’s a
good thing, inasmuch as it is at least honest. In Rawls, by contrast, the situation is more or less
endlessly obscured. Rawls precisely claims to give us a justification -- only what is in fact at best
a systematically obscure one.
At times, in his celebrated ‘Theory of Justice’, it very much appears as though Rawls, like Kant,
has the self be prior to the ends it affirms, or chooses (for discussion, see e.g. Sandel p.120), and
that the original position is a way of laying bare the constructive and voluntaristic powers of the
true -- liberal – individual. At other times, it appears as though Rawls and his individual in fact
discover antecedently true principles, and that ‘the original position’ is nothing more than a
convenient device for making this discovery perspicuous (see e.g. Sandel p.128f., and pp.177-8).
My suggestion is that Rawls’s ‘great’ text is simply unclear, and so it does not enable philosophic
progress, and certainly it does not constitute it. It merely hovers and obscures.
We cannot delay any longer considering in the body of this paper what many readers will
undoubtedly be impatiently rehearsing in their minds by now: Rawls’s gradual move in the years
after ‘Theory’ away from ‘metaphysics’ and from a deep reliance on rational choice theory and
toward a more historically-relative ‘political’ schema. Can this move help us resolve Rawls’s
quandary? My argument will be that these changes have not unmuddied the waters, and,
moreover, that they have once more exhibited far from progress. For they have simply, I shall
contend, made it (even!) less clear whether Rawls is attempting to offer a justification of a set of
moral and political principles, in any sense worthy of the name, at all. He has not, as he was in
effect urged to do by Richard Rorty,xx simply admitted a terminus to explanation/justification, in
the spirit of Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ remark on the Gods given above, or in the spirit of section
1 of ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (“Explanations come to an end somewhere”). He has not, that
is, come right out and said that these his ‘principles of justice’ are simply free-standing
suggestions for liberal individuals qua political animals to help them interpret themselves at this
point in history and geography. He has continued to maintain that his ‘theory of justice’ is to
some degree justified, and that ‘the original position’ has some justifying force. He has insisted,
that is, that ‘political liberalism’ and ‘justice as fairness’ are no mere modus vivendi, but are more
reasonable than their alternatives. But in what sense ‘more reasonable’, or ‘justified’ – and with
what justifying force, -- it is entirely unclear. Even more unclear, I will submit, than it was in his
earlier work.
It will no doubt be countered that this verdict is too harsh: It will be claimed on behalf of the
later Rawls that political liberalism, as opposed to the metaphysical liberalism that some saw the
early Rawls as putting forward, precisely gives up the claim to any Archimedeanism, of the kind
that has been a central aspect of what I have questioned, above, and that Rawls now concedes
openly that a certain set of conceptions of the good -- and far more besides (e.g. certain economic
and environmental facts) – are/is already assumed, by and in his proposed polity. It will be
suggested on behalf of ‘political liberalism’ that it is based on a framework that is not itself
argued for. Dreben calls it a “conceptual analysis”, but one that takes as given a certain
background: e.g. the U.S. Constitution, or something much like it.xxi
This may be roughly right, although Rawls continues to claim quite explicitly that his
framework can be ‘neutral’ or ‘impartial’ between conceptions of the good; we shall worry about
this shortly. If this account is (roughly) right, then later Rawls has certainly made some progress:
something has been clarified. An impossible task is no longer being attempted. Rorty’s rendering
of later Rawls is to some degree right, after all.xxii This might perhaps be heard in effect as
plumping for one horn of the Euthyphro paradox: it might perhaps amount to saying that the
‘Gods’ just choose, and that what they choose is (therefore) the rational (the reasonable), that that
must be tolerated. It could then be said that they/we, the denizens of a modern liberal polity, then
choose our individual conceptions of the good etc., and that what we so choose, in all its
(reasonable) pluralism, is what is rational (reasonable). It could be added that one is mistakenly
holding onto an old-fashioned conception of rationality if one supposes that “the normal result of
a culture of free institutions” would be a monistic comprehensive doctrine.xxiii And finally it
could be urged that “a continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious,
philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power”,xxiv
and that the flowering of human reason therefore will not yield such a continuing shared
understanding.xxv
But three (inter-related) questions naturally arise:
1) What about the unspoken framework for such ‘flowering’? Why should the choice of later
Rawls’s replacement for Euthyphro’s Gods be structured and constrained by the particular frame
that ‘political liberalism’ provides?
2) What about (allegedly) ‘unreasonable’ pluralism? Is it clear that what falls outside the
constraints of ‘political liberalism’ is really intolerable, unreasonable, not-to-be-welcomed? As
Sandel puts it, at p.1776 of his Book Review of Political Liberalism:xxvi “[Is it always]
reasonabl[e] to bracket, or set aside for political purposes, claims arising from within
comprehensive moral and religious doctrines”? (He argues, drawing on the words of Lincoln no
less, and of Abolitionist voices, that it is not.)
3) What is so great about choice, anyway? Choosing is a paradigm of the good for liberals, but
not for most creeds or belief-systems. Might it not be that later Rawls’s quasi-solution to the
Euthyphro dilemma, plumping for the choices of persons as defining what is rational, is only
likely to be attractive to one who is already convinced of the merits of a liberal solution to the
problems of political philosophy? In which case, is Rawls doing nothing more than preaching to
the choir?
I shall focus in what follows primarily on the 1st and 2nd questions, largely leaving the 3rd,
intriguing and important though it is, for some briefer thoughts that emerge from the discussion
of the first two. My strong suspicion, though I cannot argue this in full here,xxvii is that the
perhaps-sympathetic reading of later Rawls that I sketched above, a reading of him as genuinely
moving forward from a conceptual impasse in a way that early Rawls could not do, is not right.
The reason is this: that it is not clear that the problem that Rawls above all sets out to solve in his
later work, the problem of political legitimacy,xxviii is actually progressed at all, in that work, at
least if that work is interpreted as we have so far interpreted it, striving to make sense of it. (This
is, in effect, the burden of question (1), above). For sure, if we (all) simply accept the framework
of political liberalism, then we can all get along, and have a society which is ‘congruent’, but that
is little more than begging the question. (Again: Rawls claims to provide more than merely a
modus vivendi (see Political Liberalism p.147), more than merely a reflection back to us of what
we currently do and how we currently just about muddle along – he evidently does not accept
Rorty’s strong misreading of him as a nothing more than pragmatist ethnocentrist about justice
(See p.1775 of Sandel’s review). But what is the ‘more’ than this that later Rawls can intelligibly
be offering? Is there any there there that can be sustained?)
The real issue - of whether the later Rawlsian framework invites such a shared sense of stable
congruence, of legitimacy, of self-transparency, as Rawls suggests we need - depends upon
whether or not we find it to actually and genuinely find, accommodate, foster and (in any way)
legitimate an ‘overlapping consensus’, or whether in reality it fails (or would fail) to facilitate
genuine toleration of ‘minorities’ (e.g. of religious believers who are not willing to have their
religion privatised), genuine toleration of different conceptions of the good (See question (2),
above). I would claim, as I argue in detail elsewhere,xxix that it so fails (as intimated in both (1) &
(2), above). My suggestion is that all the important questions (that will impact heavily and
negatively on many conceptions of the good) about the organisation of society have already been
‘begged’, or pre-judged, by the ‘political liberalism’ framework. I would therefore suggest that
those of us who dissent from the framework that Rawls presumes and proposes can hardly be
morally nor even politically bound by it. Those of us who believe, for instance, that our humanand animal- and living- oneness with one another, with future generations, and with the planetary
ecosystem itself, is such as to demand systematic and impactful conscientious objection to war
and to ecologically-deleterious activities (such as much of industrial-growth society) will not be
satisfied to privatise our spirituality and our conscientious objection, our conscientious civil
disobedience, in the manner required by early Rawls and reinforced at length in the deliberations
of later Rawls.xxx And (we) are not convinced that there is anything in the slightest unreasonable,
at the end of the day, in our refusal to accept ‘political liberalism’. On the contrary, many of us
perhaps suspect strongly that the ‘public reason’ beloved of Rawls will in fact hasten societal and
ecological fragmentation -- and so deserves in reality to be judged as itself unreasonable as a
mode of life for human beings.
But liberal-inclined readers will probably not yet grant that. To have a chance of meeting
them, of convincing them, I need to be sure that I am doing all I can to present Rawls’s side of
the story fairly. Let me have one more go, then, at the most charitable rendering it is I think
possible to give of the later Rawls in this connection, in relation to his chosen central problem, of
political legitimacy in a time of pluralism, and then see where we have reached in relation to it:
The original position (the defender of later-Rawls may claim) models values that Rawls
maintains are implicit in the political culture of liberal democratic societies. The original position
has no independent justificatory force. Its role is simply to clarify the implications of certain
widely shared values. As for whether those values are contingent historical artifacts / products of
choice, or eternal truths – Rawls need be committed to neither view. That is why his account is
‘political, not metaphysical’. It neither claims nor denies that the values it embodies are
objective. Rawls’s view on this matter is that it is a matter of reflection for each member of a
liberal democratic society to decide what the ultimate basis of liberal values are. Different
individuals will regard those values as grounded in different ways, and some may regard them
simply as strongly held preferences. That is the underlying idea of an ‘overlapping consensus’.
Rawls’s claim is simply to have identified and drawn out the implications of certain widelyshared values which he believes can form the basis of a political justification of political
institutions. To help make this drawing-out more convincing to us, he tells a historical story
about how we have come to recognize and value toleration and liberties, a story beginning with
the wars of religion and ‘ending’ in the present day.
Say all of that is right. (Leave aside even the fact that Rawls’s historical story ‘explaining’ the
centrality of liberalism to its heirs and denizens is desperately thin and vague, hobbled by his
abstract framework and method. And leave til later the worry that the values that Rawls intends
the original position to model are part of a controversial comprehensive vision of society.) My
deepest worries about this, the most generous version of later Rawls that I think it possible to
give, others having failed, are still live. They are the following two: (i) Is the
privatization/individualization of reflection (of conscience?) envisioned here tenable, something
that makes sense?xxxi The denizens of this ‘society’ seem not to be able to have a real and rational
conversation xxxii about justice, let alone about any deeper values: Is this really a picture of a
society at all? (ii) Even if, contrary to the suggestions I have made in this paper, and that I draw
conclusions from below, question (i) can somehow be answered in the affirmative, then the key
question, the central question of my entire paper, is really just repeated in the penultimate line of
the previous paragraph. What does it mean, to say that what that paragraph sets out amounts to
anything worth calling a justification (or legitimation) of certain political institutions? The
meaning of this claim seems now entirely to have evaporated.
Let us explore further why and how this is so. The later Rawls’s central worry can be usefully
put in this way: “[A] version of liberalism that insisted that it was the one true comprehensive
doctrine would not be able to provide the kind of social stability that is part of Rawls’s
conception of a truly just, well-ordered society.” xxxiii Thus Rawls thinks that we have to resort to
a purely political liberalism. The problem of the legitimacy (cf. p.217 of Political Liberalism) or
justifiability of the state cannot be solved, at least not any longer, he thinks, through a
comprehensive doctrine (such as even that laid out in A Theory of Justice); ‘the fact of reasonable
pluralism’ sees to that. The justification must be public, via ‘public reason’; the state must be
publicly justifiable. But: why even worry about stability, to this extent and in this way? The
worry goes, as we have seen, beyond even that necessary to attain a mere modus vivendi. Rawls
in his later work seeks stability achieved in the right way and for the right reasons – the public
good of justice as fairness publicly and reciprocally endorsed by reasonable individuals. The only
answer to the question just asked, then, can be that Rawls worries like this about stability
because of a tacit, comprehensive commitment.xxxiv Given the unavoidability of comprehensive
commitments, the only questions really are questions such as whether the comprehensive
commitment(s) tacitly or explicitly underlying a given conception of society or proposal for
governance actually does effectively promote stability. There are reasons for suspecting that
Rawlsian political liberalism will not: for instance, because it is likely to increase societal
atomization (as people feel increasingly indifferent to one another’s comprehensive
commitments, if the liberal scheme with its rigorous division between public and private works
out as it is supposed to). The alternative to seeking an ‘overlapping consensus’ would be to find
an explicit comprehensive doctrine that as many of us as possible can sign up, as un-partial a
comprehensive doctrine as possible - but Rawls points us in the opposite direction to this.
Meanwhile, and decisively, Rawls’s claim that only unreasonable views are excluded
from the overlapping consensus allegedly underlying liberal society (see qu. (2), above)
completely begs the question. Rawls has tacitly defined any conceptions that do not accept
political liberalism as unreasonable.xxxv Thus political liberalism has no justificatory or
legitimatory force at all. It only appeals to those who already agree with it. It therefore cannot
help settle the question of social stability, cannot help to justify publicly anything not already felt
to be justified.
In short, I submit that ‘political liberalism’ no more answers the question which it was designed
to answer, the question of stable political legitimacy, than Rawls’s (early) theory of justice
answers the question which it was designed to answer, the question of (the nature and grounds
of) justice. The later Rawls repeats the ruse of the early Rawls. While the early Rawls tried to
make it seem as if rational choice ‘in ‘the original position’’ settled the problem of justice, so the
later Rawls tries to make it seem as if the alleged existence of an overlapping consensus with
which every ‘reasonable’ person should be satisfied settles the problem of legitimacy. If one then
asks the question as to why the original position models values already present in our society, the
answer is obvious: because that society is indeed to some extent created around liberal
individualist ideas. But this provides no legitimacy to it at all. It simply means that Rawls’s
device reflects back at us an implicit hegemonic ideology - and refusal to accept that hegemony is
simply defined by Rawls as being unreasonable.
The kindest thing to say is, then, that at the end of the day the appearance of progress hereabouts
(this time, in Rawls’s thought) has once again proved very much greater than the reality. I say
“the kindest thing to say”, because my actual view is that Rawls’s later philosophy is more
confused in this regard than his early philosophy. For even the (very limited) amount of clarity
entailed in the justificatory force of rational principles or rational choice vanishes, in the later
work.
My own view is that what the ruses of early and later Rawls alike partly conceal is what Sandel
aims to establish and perhaps makes manifest by the end of his impressive book,xxxvi with its
remorseless, more-or-less Socratic line of questioning of Rawls: that Rawls is necessarily
implicitly putting forward in his work a theory of the (liberal) individual, or rather of the self as
paradigmatically a consuming (consumerist, choosing) liberal individual xxxvii whose interest if
any in community is only a preference, and never anything constitutive of their self-identity.xxxviii
This is, contrary to general belief, so at least as much in the polity of later Rawls as in the society
of early Rawls. Later Rawls does not really involve the kind of concession to so-called
‘communitarianism’ that it is so often thought to, but rather expresses an effort to cope with and
to live with and regularise a still greater degree of societal fracturing!xxxix Later Rawls moves in
this sense in precisely the opposite direction to communitarianism. The self in later Rawls is split
between a political self, which regards as unreasonable everything that falls outside a very
narrow range of political-space and communications-methods, and a wider self that is privatized
and forbidden to interfere with that essential but narrow range. Early Rawls at least expressed
(even if not at all clearly) a comprehensive moral and political conception, the kind of thing that
communitarians think at least could be the basis of a society of some kind. Later Rawls tries to
abstract even from this (and mostly fails). Later Rawls, in other words, is about how to think
political philosophy in a setting that cannot be baldly predicated, as Rawls came to recognise the
‘Theory of Justice’ covertly was, on an explicit shared liberal political philosophy. ‘Political
Liberalism’ is a political philosophy for a world which lacks even the (thin) mutual ties of the
denizens of ‘A theory of justice’. It is a political philosophy (if that is the right word) for a world
of individualized consumerism gone wild, a world where one thinks even of the choice between
philosophies as a quasi-consumer-choice (this is the real meaning of Rawls’s famous later idea of
applying “the principle of tolerance to philosophy itself”).xl
To re-focus our minds in closing on the dilemmas of how to take ‘the original position’
that have been my main concern in this paper: what Sandel never really fully considers is the
possibility that the way in which the ‘concealment’ of which he speaks -- by Rawls, of his ‘ruse’
-- happens is that ‘the original position’ is neither really a contract, an agreement between parties,
nor even a voluntaristic or deterministic agreement by the thin god-like agent in the original
position to a set of propositionsxli (i.e. to the two principles of justice that Rawls puts forward),
but rather something more basic: such as the kind of ‘agreement’ that Wittgenstein sets out in
Philosophical Investigations sections 240-2. What Wittgenstein speaks of there is agreement in
‘form of life’. This is ‘agreement’ neither in the sense of an actual agreement (treaty, contract),
nor an unstable ‘hypothetical’ version thereof, nor again agreement in the sense of agreement
with a certain opinion, but agreement in form of community life. This could be usefully
rephrased here as ‘agreement’ in conception of the good at a level so fundamental that it escapes
any easy conceptualisation or expression. Such ‘agreement’ comes before actual explicit
agreements or agreements in opinions. That is what makes it peculiarly invulnerable to challenge
-- or understanding. It is really, an ‘agreement’ of that kind, I would submit, in a final effort to be
‘charitable’ to Rawls, and as much as possible to save him from the problem I have laid out in
this paper, that is present in the original position: ‘agreement’ in the ‘form of life’ that is liberal
individualism. That is, agreement in that form of life in politics, but also by extension across the
realm of the good, because what is agreed upon is the privatization of that realm. This implies
directly a very particular form or tradition xlii of social reason, a ‘community’ – albeit at another
level of description a pseudo-community, I would say, were I asked to judge it -- of rigidly
autonomous selves, opaque to one another, but having interests and preferences that make them
above all desiring-machines, whether what they desire is more fine food or fast cars or charity for
their fellow men or what-have-you.xliii This image of humankind is beyond argument (and is, I
suggest, tacitly but precisely behind the later Rawls’s thought that we may all be able to agree on
something to found our political community that he thinks need not be able to be agreed in the
form of an explicit philosophy) -- but this image is also, it should now be clear, decidedly
uncompulsory. Alternative possible forms of community life are imaginable, in which for
instance the denizens have values and commitments involving each other which are constitutive
of their identities; or in which in their taken-for-granted mutual dependence they lack strict
boundaries and ‘individual identities’ altogether. In such alternative forms of life as these, the
‘contractarian’ premise of the voluntariness of society xliv that Rawls wants to embrace would
appear not so much unattractive or false as absurd (as, in literal or historical terms, it is.). My
suspicion, then, is that all that Rawls’s long, involved and inconclusive arguments concerning the
nature of his ‘contractarianism’ establish is a vision of the self and its society (or ‘society’) -- a
vision, reflective of its time, that may tempt others, but is, to the present writer, at least as
unattractive, when seen clearly, as it is uncompulsory. (Rawls’s official vision of a ‘well-ordered
society’ in the end boils down, I would claim, to what I have just indicated.) xlv
And now I can only say this: What an unperspicuous way of attempting to achieve the
goal of promulgating such a vision Rawls’s writing is.
In sum; philosophy does indeed tend to exhibit a lack of progress, as Wittgenstein (following
Nestroy – see my epigraph, above) suggests. The very effort to achieve progress in philosophy
roughly after the fashion of science, in fact, is what very frequently causes philosophy to move in
a retrograde direction.xlvi It is this effort in Rawls -- most glaringly, his wish to come up with a
‘theory’, by means of introducing ‘rational choice theory’ into moral and political philosophy,
without his having addressed the fundamental, ‘timeless’ philosophical problems which were
actually at the root of the ethical issue he was concerned with; but then equally, his effort to
continue the same unclear process of producing an (at least political) conception that will satisfy
and cover us all, even once the quasi-scientific way in which this was earlier promised has been
abandoned -- which ensures that, on the most fundamental issue of his entire work, he shows less
wisdom and produces less clarity than was already present in Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’. He succeeds
only in pushing moral (and political) philosophy back to a stage inferior to that which it reached
with Socrates. In neither his earlier nor his later work does he make any progress at all; on the
contrary.
The moral of the story so far as real politics goes, then, is surely this: So much the worse
for any actual liberal politics that depends on Rawlsian liberalism or which draws upon him for
inspiration. For Rawlsian liberalism is both ill-founded and inferior to other available
philosophical inspirations. Moreover, this is of course not just a problem for Rawlsians. If
Rawls’s philosophy gets into trouble in as I have argued above, then other liberal philosophers
committed to social-contractarianism and/or to ‘neutrality’ between conceptions of the good are
doomed to find similar trouble. Most liberal philosophers and philosophies
xlvii
will thus suffer
the same fate as Rawls. In this sense, Rawls has been in this paper merely an example, and the
ramifications of the paper stretch far, across most of liberalism. To put my point in more general
terms, then: Any liberal politics that would draw its programme from some general (and as it
turns out question-begging) assumptions about reason (whether that be cashed out as ‘rational
choice theory’ or ‘public reason’ or what-have-you) is here put severely into doubt.
Rawls functions here as a central example of a more general story, whose
‘metaphilosophical’ moral, then, is this: That if there is progress in philosophy, it consists chiefly
in realizing how it is in the nature of such progress that it almost constantly seems greater than it
is. To return one last time to the case with which we opened this essay: We could certainly call
the coming of Wittgenstein a kind of progress. But then we ought to recognise still how little
Wittgenstein advanced on what was already present, when seen aright, in the great works of Kant
and Frege; how little the Investigations advances upon the Tractatus; and how little in fact the
latter advances on Plato, or indeed on the best common sense. But at least there was some
progress, in these cases.
If philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato (in the case under discussion in the present
paper: to his enduring ‘Euthyphro’ dialogue), nevertheless it would be better if some of these
footnotes had never been written. Some such footnotes do not advance matters at all, but rather
make things worse. In that category, albeit with some regret, one must place the central elements
of the works both early and late of the dominant figure in political philosophy in our time, John
Rawls, that I have here put into question.xlviii
i
P.22, revised edition; Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
ii
London: Routledge, 1922 (1961), translated by Ramsey and Ogden; sections 6.371-2.
iii
Section 1, Philosophical Investigations (London; Macmillan, 1953 (1958; 3rd edition). To avert a possible
misunderstanding here: Wittgenstein is saying here that not ‘everything’ gets explained, which (of course!) doesn’t
mean that nothing gets explained. In other words, there is no attack on science, here, whatsoever. The point of my
paper is to do with the sense of talking about -- and the degree to which recently there has been any -- progress in
philosophy (e.g. in philosophy of science -- or in moral and political philosophy). Not about the perfectly-fine and
reasonably-straightforward sense in which there is normally progress in science itself (on which, see my and Wes
Sharrock’s Kuhn (Oxford: Polity, 2002).).
iv
Thus, by Wittgensteinian lights, the move from early to later Plato is far from exhibiting progress.
v
For one important account of Rawls as a (would-be) Wittgensteinian, as (allegedly) a true follower of, a worthy
successor to, Wittgenstein, see Burton Dreben’s essay in the Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: CUP,
2003; ed. S. Freeman). For my response to this claim, see my “Wittgenstein vs Rawls”, forthcoming in the
Proceedings of the Kirchberg Wittgenstein Symposium.
vi
Take for instance this useful and influential discussion of Obama as a Rawlsian (in particular, as an advocate of
Rawls’s concept of the overlapping consensus, discussed below):
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/6/13/03244/1940 .
vii
The obvious exception to these 'mosts' and 'muchs' is Noam Chomsky, who allegedly provided the ‘existence
proof’ for cognitive science, in his ‘discovery’ of ‘syntactic structures’. I come (briefly) to Chomsky, with his
grander, truly theoretical ambition, below.
viii
Sandel in my opinion does a good job at doing so: see e.g. p.34f of Liberalism and the limits of justice
(Cambridge: CUP, 1982). (Attempts to refute Sandel on this point, such as the well-known argument made by Simon
Caney in his Liberalism and Communitarianism: a misconceived debate” (Political Studies XL (1992), pp. 273-289)
seem to me to fail badly. But again, it would take us too far afield in the present context to settle that question.) See
also my “How ought we to think of our relationship to future generations?”, forthcoming.
ix
A Theory of Justice (Oxford: OUP, 1971; italics added). Rawls has of course more recently qualified and partially-
retracted the claim with which this quotation closes: see p.60 of his "The Domain of the Political and Overlapping
Consensus”, New York University Law Review (May 1989), 64 (2): 233-255, and also n.7 on p.53 of his Political
Liberalism (New York: Columbia, 1996 (1993); see also n.xx, below). I deal with the later Rawls below. But this
localized partial-retraction in any case makes few odds with regard to the claim that I am making here about the
basic problem with Rawls’s method (at least, with his early method), a problem summed up beautifully in the
following quote, from Paul Johnston, at p.71 of his ‘Wittgenstein and moral philosophy’ (London: Routledge, 1989):
“Rawls is caught between a recognition that reasons come to an end and a belief that reasonable moral argument
must aspire toward proof and a Euclidean-type system.”
x
Again, it might be objected against me here that the later Rawls has a less ‘rationalistic’ approach. This is true – see
below for my response to the later Rawls in respect of the subject matter of this paper. However, we shouldn’t in any
case exaggerate the change between ‘early’ and ‘later’ Rawls: Rawls’s Political Liberalism still fully endorses the
original-position-style-approach (and the veil of ignorance; see e.g. 1:4), and only ‘clarifies’ that it is a “device of
representation” (p.25).
xi
Liberalism and the limits of justice, p.119.
xii
For my Wittgensteinian critique of Chomsky, see "How I learned to love (and hate) Noam Chomsky", in
Philosophical Writings 15 & 16 (2000/1), 23-48.
xiii
This immediately raises the worry that I explore further below: that there is what Wittgenstein would see as a kind
of constitutive unclarity, a ‘conjuring trick’, in the movement, via ‘reflective equilibrium’ ‘in’ ‘the original position’,
from “widely accepted but weak premises to more specific conclusions” (Rawls, Theory of Justice (Cambridge:
Harvard, 1971; henceforth ToJ), p.18).
xiv
Sandel tends to lean toward this interpretation of Rawls, in the latter part of his book.
xv
They have no knowledge even of the level of technology of the society that they are choosing principles for!
xvi
In short, they do not seem to escape having the metaphysically dubious status of Kant’s ‘noumenal selves’, the
legislators in the ‘Kingdom of Ends’. Little indeed has changed since the time of Gods, indeed since Euthyphro’s and
Socrates’s time.
Rawls, being anxious to avoid such dubiety, reinterprets the original position in his subsequent work (subsequent to
Theory of Justice; all references to this work are to the original edition); I discuss this in some detail below.
xvii
See p.20 of Rawls’s Theory. Some argue that ‘reflective equilibrium’ undoes the Rawlsian claim to liberal
neutrality; or alternatively that it is already inconsistent with any ambition for an ‘Archimedean point’. These
interesting claims have been much-discussed elsewhere, and I cannot engage with them seriously here. I would,
however, remind readers of the very subsidiary role that Rawls conceives ‘reflective equilibrium’ as having, in A
theory of justice. One ought to beware of reading Rawls’s later work back into his early work: the fact of the matter
is that, in A Theory of Justice, the great majority of the text is occupied by rational choice theory, and it is ‘the
original position’ and not ‘reflective equilibrium’ that mainly determines the content of such theory. (See e.g. p.328
of ToJ) One (admittedly somewhat crude!) indicator of this is as follows: ‘reflective equilibrium’ occupies only one
and a bit lines in the index to the text; ‘the original position’ occupies fully 29 lines!
If it be asked why Theory remains worthy of attention at all on its own, given Rawls’s later move away from it, part
of the answer is that it is because many avowed Rawlsians - notably for instance ‘left’ Rawlsians such as Brian
Barry, and ‘Kantian’ Rawlsians such as Onora O’Neill - continue to follow / support it, and do not much care for
Rawls’s later philosophy. (The situation thus neatly inverts that of Wittgenstein: virtually no-one doubts that the
Tractatus is worthy of scholarship on its own terms, even though the majority of ‘Wittgensteinians’ do not care for
Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. ...Their judgement is not, incidentally, one that I share -- along with other ‘New
Wittgensteinians’, I believe that Wittgenstein’s later work shows progress relative to his early work less than is
commonly believed -- for I believe his early work to be far superior to the caricatural understanding of it that still
tends to prevail. And, in support of this reading of later Wittgenstein as only improving to a certain limited degree
over the (genius of) early Wittgenstein, I would of course cite the motto of the Investigations, my epigraph, above.)
xviii
Now, what if these “considered judgements” stably differ, reflecting an enduring pluralism? This is a key
problem that Rawls’s later work addresses: see below for some discussion.
See p.139 of Theory. All the talk of “the parties” and of “agreement” is thus rather bizarre: if the Theory turns out
xix
to be about an individual reasoning. (The individual who reasons in the original position cannot, for Rawls, have an
identity that matters. Once we think of the occupant of the original position as (if h/He were) a g/God, this indeed
becomes pretty obvious: a g/God just reasons, unencumbered by an identity with others, and not, presumably, coconstitutive with any others. That, presumably, is what makes ‘h/Him’ a g/God.)
xx
See the latter’s “The priority of democracy to philosophy”, in A. Malachowski (ed.), Reading Rorty (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990).
xxi
See again his essay in the Cambridge Companion to Rawls. (This of course explains why some ‘Rawlsians’ don’t
much like the later Rawls -- it threatens to remove the sense of quasi-scientific explanation with which they hope to
take on and beat their opponents.)
xxii
Take the following striking remark, from p.53 of Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia, 1996 (all quotes
from the 2nd (‘revised’) paperback edition): “To see justice as fairness as trying to derive the reasonable from the
rational misinterprets the original position. Here I correct a remark in A theory of justice, where it is said that the
theory of justice is a part of the theory of rational decision... this is simply incorrect.” Reading remarks such as this,
one can see why some theoreticistically-minded Rawlsians were dismayed by the revisionary claims of later Rawls...
It is, however, another issue, though one I shall not address here, whether remarks such as this one can be
successfully followed up, in re-reading early Rawls, without simply jettisoning vast portions of (i.e. most of) the text
of the Theory of Justice altogether, which later Rawls doesn’t want to be doing.
See Rawls’s “The idea of public reason revisited”, p.573, in Rawls’s Collected Papers (ed. Samuel Freeman
xxiii
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1999)).
xxiv
Political Liberalism, p37.
xxv
See p.319f. of Dreben, for amplification.
xxvi
Harvard Law Review 107 (1994); pp.1765-1994. Furthermore, as Sandel argues (at p.1782f.), and as I provide
flesh for in my “How ought we to think of our relationship with future generations?” (forthcoming), there is
pluralism too concerning the content of justice. Is it really remotely plausible to hold, as Rawls seems committed to
holding, that the rejection of political liberalism amounts ipso facto to an unreasonable view, part of an unreasonable
pluralism, concerning the proper nature of justice in societies such as ours? Is it remotely plausible that holding rival
views about justice (to Rawls’s) is less reasonable than holding rival views about morality, philosophy, and religion?
As Sandel puts it at p.1788: “Is Milton Friedman’s objection to redistributive policies a less “reasonable pluralism”
than Pat Robertson’s objection to gay rights?” (See especially also p.1783 of Sandel; and further discussion in the
body of my text, below.)
I do so, in my “On Rawls’s failure to preserve genuine (freedom of) religion”, forthcoming, and in chapter 3
xxvii
(“Religion without belief”) of my Philosophy for Life (ed. M.A. Lavery; London: Continuum, 2007).
xxviii
Summed up by Dreben thus: “under what conditions will someone properly accept a law as legitimate, even if he
differs with it, even if he thinks it unjust” (op.cit., p.317).
xxix
See my “On Rawls’s failure to preserve genuine (freedom of) religion”, forthcoming.
xxx
See the argument of my “The case of John Rawls vs. the refuseniks”, Practical Philosophy, Vol. 10.1, November
2009, pp.56-63. Much as Sandel argues in his Review of Political Liberalism that the later Rawls would have badly
hobbled the Abolitionist movement and Lincoln’s Presidency, so now Rawlsian liberalism is implicitly assisting the
kind of hospitality our institutions show to environmental profligacy and theft from the future, to systematic animal
torture and murder, etc. . What this boils down to, in my opinion (and not just mine – see for instance n.xxxiv below,
and see Raymond Geuss’s polemic against Rawls in Philosophy and real politics (Princeton: Princeton U. Press,
2008)), is this: Political liberalism is a small-c conservative doctrine. It is fine if you believe that our society has very
roughly got things right. It is no good if you think that we need to tear up any of our basic institutions and start again,
and place different values centrally. In this regard, the later Rawls provides a quasi-Hegelian apologia for the status
quo, just like the early Rawls does.
Some will find this an odd take on Rawls, who is normally thought of as a figure on the Left. And indeed, it is of
course true that there are many on the political Right who are unreasonably excluded from Rawls’s ‘public reason’:
such as Muslim and Christian Fundamentalists, and also probably some real libertarians. It is moreover arguably true
that liberal thinkers of the past (and the framers of the U.S. Constitution) would have been astonished at the extent to
which contemporary liberalism is prepared to accommodate a huge welfarist state. But this is not incompatible with
my suggestion that Rawlsian liberalism is in the current political context a fundamentally conservative doctrine,
which undercuts the possibility of radical political and social change.
However, I cannot support this claim further here; I do so, in my “The difference principle is not action-guiding”,
forthcoming.
xxxi
Drawing on an analogy with Wittgenstein’s anti-‘private-language’-considerations, I argue otherwise in my
“Wittgenstein vs. Rawls” (op.cit.).
xxxii
In Rush Rhees’s sense of ‘conversation’ (or ‘discourse’), and possibly also in Oakeshott’s (not merely in
Rorty’s); see Rhees’s Wittgenstein and the possibility of discourse (Cambridge: CUP. 1988).
xxxiii
Liberals and communitarians, Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift (2nd edition; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p.175.
My own view, explored in my “An empirical refutation of the difference principle” (forthcoming), is that Rawls
ought to worry much more about the social instability caused by inequality and ‘envy’ (i.e. caused by the difference
principle). But I cannot explore this here.
xxxiv
This point is made at length in the fascinating, incendiary work of Paul Treanor on Rawls’s Political Liberalism
(http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/rawls.html ):
“Rawls has a specific view of what liberalism is for: essentially, long-term stability. His work is explicitly intended
to provide a basis for transgenerational stability, a goal which he restates several times. At no time does Rawls
consider whether transgenerational stability is a desirable goal: apparently he finds that self-evident:
‘...the problem of stability has played very little role in the history of moral philosophy....the problem of stability is fundamental
to political philosophy...’ (Political Liberalism, Introduction, p. xvii)
I also think the problem of stability is central: political philosophy should be about how to overcome stability. That is
a value orientation opposite to that of John Rawls, but you will find no trace of it in Rawls' work. He writes as if noone could think such a thing. Rawls also has a clear picture of what he wants to avoid: civil strife. Again he gives no
justification for making the avoidance of civil strife a primary social goal. He simply assumes it to be self-evidently
necessary that societies are like this.
In other words, Rawls is presenting what he often claims to avoid: a comprehensive quasi-religious doctrine. It is
politically a conservative doctrine. It has two underlying principles: that stability is good in itself, and that society
should be structured to avoid civil strife, and promote stability.” (Underlining added)
xxxv
For devastating argument to this conclusion, see pp.237-8 and p.245 of Mulhall and Swift, op.cit. And this
passage, from their “Rawls and communitarianism” (in S. Freeman, ed., op.cit.), p.484: “There is, in short,
no…principled difference between political liberalism and the comprehensive liberalisms it condemned as sectarianno form of liberal anti-perfectionism that is not founded on a comprehensive and controversial vision of human wellbeing.” From friends of Rawls such as these, this is a devastating judgement. (For reinforcement, compare also the
similar and similarly-devastating criticism of later Rawls on this point at p.307 of Jerry Cohen’s Rescuing justice and
equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2008)).
xxxvi
And compare also Sandel’s later remarks on later Rawls, for instance in his “A response to Rawls’s Political
Liberalism”, in the 2nd edition of his Liberalism and the limits of justice.
xxxvii
As depicted powerfully in the oeuvre of Zygmunt Bauman, among others.
xxxviii
Saying this would perhaps seem to ignore the important concession that Sandel can seem to make to Rawls at
p.1770 of his Review of Political Liberalism (op.cit.). In n.17, Sandel points out that Part III of A Theory of Justice
already contains a Kantian conception of the person. But Sandel then allows that, in Political Liberalism, “Rather
than defend the Kantian conception of the person as a moral ideal, [Rawls] argues that liberalism as he conceives it
does not depend on that conception of the person after all. The priority of the right over the good does not
presuppose any particular conception of the person, not even the one advanced in Part III of A Theory of Justice.”
However, and the remainder of Sandel’s review bears this out, there is still a theory of the person presupposed: it is
presupposed that persons are the kind of beings that can ‘tolerate’ and indeed embrace the kind of extreme split
between public reason and private comprehensive conception(s) – the latter entirely conceived of as merely the
person’s interests – that the later Rawls demands. I think that they (we) do not and mostly cannot. Often, when we
stand somewhere morally, philosophically, or religiously, we can and would do no other. As Sandel in effect points
out towards the end of his Review, it would be so much the worse for our political culture, if this were not so.
xxxix
Rawls is living in a time in which society splits apart more in the direction of individualism under the strains of
‘liberal capitalism’. The real trajectory of his work, I am suggesting, is a response to that change. His work is a
symptom of its times, and in no way a remedy for their desperate defects. (In future work, I hope to follow the lead of
Georg Lohmann's Indifferenz und Gesellschaft: Eine kritische Auseinanderzetzung mit Marx (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1991), which suggests that Marx’s real topic in relation to the critique (and crisis) of capitalism is how it breeds
indifference, by arguing that modern liberal polities and political philosophy turn tolerance (which can seem a good
thing) into mutual indifference (which certainly is a bad thing) – and that the later Rawls is an apogee of this
dangerous and mostly-unintended trend in human relations.)
xl
At p.246 of “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985): 223-252.
xli
Sandel suggests that this is really what is happening, on p.130 of his book.
xlii
Here I am thinking especially of Alisdair MacIntyre’s work on the ‘tradition’ of liberalism: particularly of his
three powerful post-After Virtue books.
xliii
See e.g. Theory p.417. It would be of considerable interest to undertake a thorough compare-and-contrast
exercise between Rawls’s theory of the self and the Buddhist ‘theory’ of the (non-)self that has finally emerged into
some prominence in the West over the last generation. In my “Three strikes against the difference principle”
(forthcoming), I begin this task, suggesting that liberalism is actually a paradigm-case of the (anti-Buddhist) Western
doctrine of the ‘hungry’ self, a doctrine that has been perhaps-terminally destructive of both solidarity and the
planetary ecosystem, over the past few centuries.
“No society can, of course, be a scheme of cooperation which men enter voluntarily in a literal sense; each person
xliv
finds himself placed at birth in some particular position in some particular society... Yet a society satisfying the
principles of justice as fairness comes as close as a society can to being a voluntary scheme, for it meets the
principles which free and equal persons would assent to under circumstances that are fair. In this sense its members
are autonomous and the obligations they recognise self-imposed.” Theory, p.13; italics added.
xlv
This suspicion of mine is, I hope to have made clear, a well-motivated one; albeit hardly one that I can claim to
have supported at all decisively through textual exegesis. (That would of course require a much longer piece of
work.)
xlvi
For directly analogous arguments with regard to the so-called human or social sciences, see pp.126-130 of my
Kuhn (Oxford: Polity, 2002).
xlvii
Though not, of course, all: for instance, ‘perfectionist’ liberals such as Joseph Raz will need separate treatment.
xlviii
Thanks, for important points of clarification, to Juliet Floyd, Phil Hutchinson, Thomas Wallgren, an anonymous
referee, and the editor of Philosophy. And thanks for a painstaking reading of an earlier draft, to Angus Ross.
However, these people do not of course share responsibility for the strong opinions expressed here.